Hiding from the boycott: An industry of settlement deceit

Despite their intentions, the new EU guidelines may serve as a boost for an already growing industry of lies and deceit, meant to hide away settlement products and other forms of occupation profiteering.

Judging by the front pages of all Israeli newspapers today (Wednesday), the new European Union guidelines have nearly put the country in a state of emergency. As Noam Sheizaf puts it, Europe has gotten our attention. The new guidelines for European grants, prizes and programs are a serious and positive step in the ongoing attempt to clarify for Israelis that settlements are not just regular Israeli towns and cities, but are deeply entrenched and fortified in an apartheid-style regime. They are also likely to cause (and are already causing) the Israeli government a serious headache as it would not be able to sign declarations pledging separation between projects taking place on both sides of the Green Line. That would be political suicide.

However, the catastrophic implications for the Israeli economy might not be as dramatic as some might be tempted to think. In fact, Israeli companies already have systems in place to avoid sanctions and boycotts of this sort due to their ongoing struggle against the international BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) campaign.

Take, for example, the second point in the new guidelines, which specifies that “The place of establishment is understood to be the legal address where the entity is registered, as confirmed by practice postal address corresponding to a concrete physical location.” I can imagine several industrialists having a good laugh at this one. As the Who Profits project shows, Israeli companies that operate in the occupied territories have been solving this problem quite well with a complex system of deceit. SodaStream, for example, is one of several companies that rents an office in Airport City, adjacent to the Ben-Gurion International Airport, using it as its official address to hide its factory’s location in the Mishor Adumin industrial park in the West Bank (see pages 27-9, PDF). AHAVA cosmetics use the same trick with their small office in Lod, also near the airport, despite the fact that manufacturing only takes place in the Mitzpeh Shalem settlement (see page 44, PDF). Settlement agricultural produce is marketed under the nation-wide exporting company Agrexco, also not recognized internationally as an occupation profiteering company. All these measures help companies dodge the special taxes levied on settlement products.

College in Ariel, West Bank, operating under the “Council for Higher Education – Judea and Samaria” (Wikimedia CC BY SA 3.0)

In a way, the state itself works in a similar fashion. When authorities wanted to open a new regional radio station for settlements and were challenged for it in court, they set up a mirror regulator which regulates privately owned television and radio. The new regulator, “The Second Authority for Television and Radio – Judea and Samaria,” is similar to its pre-67 borders sibling in every way, except that it operates under martial law. The same goes for the Council for Higher Education (CHE), which has a military sponsored “Judea and Samaria” sibling that regulates Ariel University, allowing the CHE to be “clean” of settlement involvement, although universities and colleges under its auspices do have their own connections with the settlement campus.

One can easily picture how the new EU guidelines will give rise to this sort of deceitful trickery. More and more companies might start renting Tel Aviv or Lod or Airport City box-sized offices to fake their manufacturing address. Or perhaps they will set up a series of front organizations to separate between their work in the occupied territories and their international dealings. Banks might break up their mortgage and loan operations for settlements and set them up as external banking companies located in the Cayman Islands. Who knows, maybe the state will be able to avoid its own political entanglement by creating these complicated systems of charades? It might work, but it will drive a constantly growing segment of society to doing things that are more commonly associated with crooks and wrongdoers. And maybe it will be that feeling that will one day help end the occupation.

It is that notion that brings to mind the opening chapter in J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime, in which he writes the following (J.M. Coetzee, Summertime, 2009, Viking Press):

Once upon a time he used to think that the men who dreamed up the South African version of public order, who brought into being the vast system of labour reserves and internal passports and satellite townships, had based their vision on a tragic misreading of history. They had misread history because, born on farms or in small towns in the hinterland, and isolated within a language spoken nowhere else in the world, they had no appreciation of the scale of the forces that had since 1945 been sweeping away the old colonial world. Yet to say they had misread history was in itself misleading. For they read no history at all. On the contrary, they turned their backs on it, dismissing it as a mass of slanders put together by foreigners who held Afrikaners in contempt and would turn a blind eye if they were massacred by the blacks, down to the last woman and child.

Alone and friendless at the remote tip of a hostile continent, they erected their fortress state and retreated behind its walls: there they would keep the flame of Western Christian civilization burning until finally the world came to its senses.

That was the way they spoke, more or less, the men who ran the National Party and the security state, and for a long time he thought they spoke from the heart. But not any more. Their talk of saving civilization, he now tends to think, has never been anything but a bluff. Behind a smokescreen of patriotism they are at this very moment sitting and calculating how long they can keep the show running (the mines, the factories) before they will need to pack their bags, shred any incriminating documents, and fly off to Zurich or Monaco or San Diego, where under the cover of holding companies with names like Algro Trading or Handfast Securities they years ago bought themselves villas and apartments as insurance against the day of reckoning (dies irae, dies illa).

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COMMENTS

Precisely because of the deception commonly practiced by Israeli producers and manufacturers in order to mislead consumers about the provenance of their products, I have concluded that it is best not to buy any products that are “made in Israel.”

Reply to Comment

The Trespasser

WednesdayJuly 17, 2013

You’d astonished by amount of Israeli products which are not labelled as “Made in Israel”. I’m speaking of high-tech obviously: Software, hardware, pharmacy, biotechnology…

Vadim

I would also ignore major inventions and technologies made in Israel. As an act of solidarity, you could select from the vast variety of Palestinian, Syrian, Iranian and Egyptian technologies.

Then you could stop speaking with Jewish people, because some of them might be Israelis or (god forbid) from Ariel.

Reply to Comment

sh

WednesdayJuly 17, 2013

That Coetzee is just one hell of a quote. Goosebumps.

Reply to Comment

Danny

ThursdayJuly 18, 2013

Agree. Seems like it was written word for word about another country.

And yet, it’s not really all that surprising: For who was one of South Africa’s best friends and allies all throughout the dark years of apartheid in the 60′s, 70′s and 80′s? Who sold South Africa weapons, and trained its security forces in the art of controlling a large and increasingly resentful native population?

Bird of a feather indeed flock together. And that great statesman and Nobel laureate Shimon Peres was a particularly busy bird in the 1970′s and 80′s.

Reply to Comment

Bettina

WednesdayJuly 17, 2013

yes, the quote is amazing. thanks for the article, disillusioning as it is…

The settlements are meant to be part of Greater Israel, so their fictional residence and be anywhere therein. Yet the general expansion of Greater Israel will entail economic connections with the prior population, which means social connections as well–and that is the lever needed to refuse servitude in one’s own home.

Reply to Comment

Dave Boxthorn

ThursdayJuly 18, 2013

Since the BDS movement believes in boycotting anything made in Israel, what difference does it make where the address is?

Reply to Comment

Haifawi

ThursdayJuly 18, 2013

Because some (most) people in the ‘mainstream’ international community draw a distinction between Israel and its profit from territories that Israel claims are inhabited by ‘foreigners.’

Reply to Comment

The Trespasser

ThursdayJuly 18, 2013

>…from territories that Israel claims are inhabited by ‘foreigners.’

Yeah, these evil Jooz even went to UN, to have a “Palestinian” state proclaimed so they could back their inhumane claims.

In 2002, Matar was part of the Shministim (Seniors) Letter to then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and was imprisoned for two years for his refusal to enlist in the Israeli army. Since his release, he has been active in various groups against the occupation, as well as in several class-based struggles within Israeli society.

About +972 Magazine

+972 is an independent, blog-based web magazine. It was launched in August 2010, resulting from a merger of a number of popular English-language blogs dealing with life and politics in Israel and Palestine.

+972 is an independent, blog-based web magazine. It was launched in August 2010, resulting from a merger of a number of popular English-language blogs dealing with life and politics in Israel and Palestine.